The core team that organised the trip was composed mainly of 3 academic staff from Computing. The COMP team had already taken several teams to Hubei and Gansu in Mainland China on serious community service projects from 2006 to 2009. They served initially at secondary schools in Huang Shi and Yang Xin in Hubei in central China, running workshops and competitions on robotic car designs and programming, from 2006 to 2008. It was very well received by the students and their schools.
Then the team moved further northwest where the poverty was worse and the need seemed greater, to a newly setup primary school in remote mountains in Dingxi, Gansu.
They solicited funds from friends to purchase several desktop computers and set up from scratch computer networks, both wired and wireless.
They computerised a school library by putting RFID tags in 2,000 books and created an electronic book lending system.
They offered workshops on robotics, multimedia, etc. They even set up a remote teaching system whereby English teachers in a primary school in Hong Kong were committed to teach weekly English classes to the orphans in the primary school in Dingxi via video conferencing. In 2009 it was rather advanced technology.
The team felt they found a stable, committed, well-run partner. They thought they had built up a solid platform for collaboration for many years, and a base for more variety of projects, because they depth of poverty and need was tremendous. Unfortunately it was not to be. Less than a month after the team came back from Gansu in summer 2009, the school was abruptly closed down by the government. It was a huge huge disappointment for the team. That also prompted the team to look farther afield.
Church connections brought the team’s attention to Cambodia. Cambodia went through a genocidal civil war in 1974-79, followed by many years of continued, albeit lower level conflict. The situation only started to stabilise beginning in 2000. By 2010, the general population was still very poor, infrastructure such as roads, electricity and water supply were in very bad shape, and the government was rife with corruption. News coming out were mostly bad: children scrambling alongside adults on the city’s garbage dump for plastics, glass and metals for recycling, trafficking of young girls and children for sex, … On the other hand, foreign investment was pouring in, garment factories were being built, roads were being repaired and new ones built, buildings and apartments going up, lakes being filled up to build houses. Information Technology and English skills treasured for business. One good thing was that the country is open to foreigners, and there apparently were few interference in foreign NGOs.
We made contact with a number of potential partner NGOs in Cambodia. One was an NGO (Village Earth) set up by some professor from University of Colorado, which had setup several community centres in the slums in Phnom Penh, serving youths in poverty, teaching them reading and writing, basic computer skills, etc. Another was a primary school run by a Hong Kong-based NGO (International Christian Concern) near the city’s infamous garbage dump at Stung Meanchey. It served the children who were not able to attend government schools, mostly because of poverty. Officially, no fees were required to attend government schools. However, the schools were so under-funded and teachers so under-paid that fees were collected for things such as books, exercises, etc., with the consequence that many children could not afford to attend school. A third was an orphanage school also run by ICC in collaboration with another missionary organization from Hong Kong, an hour outside Phnom Penh, among the rice fields. Some of the children actually had families, but they were so poor the parent(s) could not take care of the children and sent them to the orphanage to be taken care of. A third partner was White Lotus, a women’s shelter run by two many missionaries from USA, providing a home and rehabilitation for young girls rescued from being trafficked for sex, many of them were heavy traumatised and barely surviving under very dire situations - addressing a very disturbing human tragedy in Cambodia. A fourth partner was another NGO, Anjali House, which provide schooling for children in poverty in Siem Reap, near the world famous Ankor Wat ruins.
Having considered the needs of the country, input from our partners and our own capabilities and experience, we felt we could play a role broadly in the area of strengthening education, particularly among the children and other underprivileged groups. We could do IT infrastructure such as computer networks, workshops on basic IT skills, robotics, multimedia, etc. We brainstormed on a theme that has broad application, easy to teach, that can benefit from technology, and settled on digital-storytelling - teaching the children and young people how to tell stories enhanced with digital images and videos. By chance, we ran into Professor Cecilia Pang of University of Colorado Boulder, who happened to be in Hong Kong at the time. She taught our team “image theatre” - a kind of performance very useful for teaching storytelling.
We started recruiting students in the Spring semester. We had been working with mostly students from the Department of Computing so far, in our previous projects. At that point we felt we have had enough experience and felt confident we could train students in other majors with the needed IT and other skills to carry out the projects. We felt we should be more inclusive and give other students a chance to benefit from the project. On the other hand, students with different skills can also enrich the team. When we advertised the project on campus, we received close to 200 applications! We shortlisted 70 promising ones for interview, and eventually accepted 35 (22 from Computing and 13 from other departments).
This was a project that we (basically 3 professors from Computing) initiated ourselves. We were not given any funding. The cost per student, including airplane ticket, accommodation for 10 days, meals, equipment and consumables added up to 6,000-7,000 HK dollars (just under 1,000 US dollars). We could ask the students to pay their own way. But we didn’t want it to be something that only rich students can participate in. So we wrote proposals to a government agency, to our own department, to the dean of our faculty, … And we were able to secure the funding needed without too much difficulty. It reaffirmed our faith - that there are donors and organisations that are quite willing to support service-learning projects with tangible benefits to both (1) the community and (2) the students.
We started training the students in the Spring Semester. We had planned several different projects around the theme of digital storytelling, serving a number of different groups, with quite different needs. There were a lot of things we had to teach the students to get them ready for the projects. Prof. Cecilia Pang from University of Colorado taught us how to do “image theatre”. An experienced social worker and a friend, Ms. Megan Hui, gave us a crash course on volunteering. We thought we should pay her for her services since this is how she made a living, but she refused to take any payment because she felt it was a good cause. We needed to prepare the students, mentally as well as physically, for the health risks - infectious diseases, travelling precautions, HIV, etc. A doctor gave us a lot help. Throughout, we gave the students training on setting up computers, networks, etc. The students prepared their own lessons for the workshops that they were going to provide.
Finally, we felt the students were ready, and flew to Phnom Penh on Sunday, June 26, 2010. For most of us, this was the first time we set foot in Cambodia.
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